Advertising and marketing professionals seek to reach consumers in new and innovative ways. With the widespread use of wireless communication devices and continuing advances in handset technology, new advertising avenues are becoming readily available. For example, many mobile devices are equipped with software that enables the devices to access the web to retrieve information desired by the user. Such information may be accompanied by various forms of advertisement. For example, users may retrieve Internet web pages that provide news, weather, traffic, and/or sports information of interest. Such web pages may include banner ads to promote the sponsors of those web pages. Other forms of advertising include animations, interactive “games”, and musical themes.
It would be desirable to enable advertisers to reward consumers for their attention to such advertisements. For example, advertisers may wish to provide coupons, “desktop themes”, puzzles, or other rewards for experiencing the advertisement. If such rewards are not a standard item (e.g., an “http” web page, a “jad” application, or a “gcd” ringer), there exists no seamless way for the user to obtain the item. In other words, the user cannot, by simply selecting an ad, cause a non-standard item to be downloaded by the mobile device. Unlike desktop computers, mobile devices do not uniformly employ full-function, standard-compliant web browsers. Thus mobile devices generally do not support a uniform “download” protocol that enables newly-conceived items to be downloaded to the mobile device for use by different applications.